A renaissance man for the twenty-first century!
I took this snap of an unattended stand where you can buy candies and sweets. You can either put your money into a little box – or else pay electronically.
It’s wonderful to live in a modern European country that has such a high degree of security and trust!
Continuing the series, I’ve had this Honda 125cc scooter in my personal fleet for a few years now:
After a very reliable conveyance of over 50K km, the Eiger Chopper could not pass the Swiss vehicle inspection without a significant investment, more than what I needed to buy the Eiger Chopper used.
If you live in Switzerland then you know how it is. Luzern seems to be the “sacrificial city.” Tour guides, bus operators, and the like all route the tourists to the city of Luzern. It is a very touristy city.
But one of the real jewels in the crown of Switzerland is a closely guarded secret that not a lot of people outside Switzerland know about, Bern. And I’ve often thought, that is exactly how the locals like it, to keep the marauding hoards of tourists from spoiling the city.
As artistic a snap as I thought I could take while driving northeast towards Corpus Christi along Route 37 in south Texas,
When I hear the term Disciplined Agile, I think of someone punishing Agile – and that makes me happy!
Agile needs a good punishing.
Reason: many companies in Switzerland are now investing strongly in agile (which is good) but like most agile advocates they teach and often attempt to set up Agile with GOs (Gross Oversimplifications) that only apply to IUs (Impossible Utopias).
Many companies in Switzerland also seem to suffer badly from the misconception that Agile = Scrum. This is entirely untrue, and it doesn’t help the situation. I’ve worked in classical waterfall projects that took ultra-agile approaches.
How does DA come in?
DA ist not a framework but rather a toolbox – toolboxes are always nice!
The English like their bricks. Good, solid, kiln-fired bricks.
In fact, not a lot of people know this, but there is a country-wide ordinance that says from any public space there must be at least one house or building that is visible that has been cladded with bricks. There is a very unusual trade (brickechequers, please note the British spelling); these are people employed by the government who visit the public places and fine any property owners, if their properties are visible from a public space but do not contain a minimum number of bricks.
Anyway, the north of England is no exception to the rule. (Digression: many scholars believe North England might even be the historical home of bricks, as even today the North Englander’s seem to enjoy putting things in on top of other things.)
I was given a wonderful guided tour through the northeastern English village of York and the territory known as Yorkshire, where I captured this incredible snap:
Vincent van Gough, that is, because this is the site, Monastery Saint-Paul de Mausole, in the tiny southern French commune of St. Remy de Provence where Vincent stayed in a hospital and painted:
Here is a nice sign:
Vincent van Gough put the tiny French commune of St. Remy de Provence on the map, since this is where he stayed in a hospital. Just a stone’s throw from that hospital (literally, across the street!) is a pretty impressive site of ancient ruins, called Site Archéologique de Glanum. There are many more ruins than shown here – these are just the most impressive ones next to the parking lot:
It’s a good life in the south of France.
Whereas Swiss pidgeons in the middle of winter are worrying about food and avoiding freezing to death, these Provential pidgeons are using the medieval water fountain in Arles to take a bath and keep their feathers clean:
Sadly, too much literature about agile Ways of Working (WoW) is all about agile Ways of Working – and it stops there.
For Grossly Oversimplified (GO) Impossible Utopia (IU) situations, that works.
But in my own experience, for the real world complexity, agile Ways of Working are only the beginning.
Much, much more is needed for success. As put in the following article: Successful software development teams need to strike a balance between quickly delivering working software systems, satisfying their stakeholders, addressing their risks, and improving their ways of working.
There’s an interesting framework that may help; this is really very interesting and pragmatic stuff:
Don’t let this fool you, however. When I first looked at it, it immediately reminded me of maturity models, such as CMMI. In a maturity model, you can stop at the level that makes sense for you, or even have mixtures of maturity in different areas.
This is not that! As you’ll notice, here’s it’s all about degree of operationalization.
This snap really appeals to me.
It’s a juxtaposition of protection in the southern French village of Arles. In the foreground, modern protection against Covid; in the background, medieval protection against lawless threats. And on the side, that column you see is the sensor for a bollard, a modern traffic barricade that helps keep the inner city streets free from the threat of terrorists using their vehicles as weapons.
All three things serving a very similar purpose, keeping out something that is unwanted.
This wasn’t just any shrimp and broccoli; it was my shrimp and broccoli, cooked in a new pot that I purchased at the Aligro wholesale market in Zürich.
The Camargue region in southern France (essentially the swampy delta where the Rhone River empties into the Mediterranean Sea) is famous for its white horses, which many scientists actually think are one of the oldest breeds of horses in the world.
I took this snap down a deserted road in the Camargue, just outside of Sainte-Marie-de-Mer in the south of France
As artistic a snap as I thought I could take of what I think (but am not entirely sure) is a cement factory just outside of the southern French village of Beaucaire,
There are many good things about France that trace their origin back to Napolean – and the zillions of kilometers of streets in the south of France, lined by plane trees carefully planted to give shade to army troops, is one of them.
Here is as artistic a snap as I thought I could take of a street in the southern French village of Beaucaire, lined with plane trees:
If you think they are all leaning to the right, you’d be right. This part of France lives under the so-called Mistral wind, a wind of up to nearly 75 km/hr that forces trees to grow tilted. I visited in the winter, and there were numerous times I had to stop the Euro Cruiser, my minivan, because the wind gusts were too strong to safely drive.
Continuing the series, here is a snap from the Southern French village of Agde,
Continuing the series, what makes Agde so interesting for me is that many buildings have been built with a dark stone – and you just don’t see that in other French villages.
If you think there is something a bit amiss with this facade, you’d be right:
In fact, I naively walked by until I saw a couple of tourists taking a picture, so I backed up and realized: there are no balconies on that face at all! In fact, it is a flat building, and what you see is just a very clever painting with perspective.
It’s a tribute to an artist who was born here, Jean-Antoine Injalbert. Funny thing, though, lest you jump to any conclusions: the artist was a famous French sculptor:
Here’s a pretty impressive snap of a downtown square in the southern French city of Arles, taken at around noon time – and as you can see, what should be a bustling, hectic square filled with people stands essentially empty:
I honestly, positively cannot believe it – today marks the 20th anniversary of an article that appeared that described my work at the Max-Planck-Institute in Stuttgart!
I’ve done a lot of things in my life that have made me proud, usually challenges I tackled that worked out well.
But this is one of those whirlwind cases that start out as something innocent and simple but then explode into something you could never, ever possibly predict! In this case, a little software application for my “office buddy” to visualize his scientific data that was subsequently downloaded and used by thousands of scientists!
I have documented the full story about ScanRead and DataScan.
I really like the way this snap turned out, I did not post-processing on it whatever. It captures the L’Église Saint-Baudile de Nîmes in the southern French city of Nimes. I especially like the way that the yellows of the building contrast with the grays of the sky.
It’s quite a new cathedral, as far as cathedrals go, having been built in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
I’ve probably published this snap before, but I liked the idea of a panoramic threepeat,
